The jinxed women’s reservation bill received a boost today with a parliamentary panel advocating immediate passage in its present form. The panel rejected any dilution of the proposed 33 per cent quota for women with party-based reservation or double-member constituencies. The bill on women’s reservation in the Lok Sabha and state Assemblies should be passed “and put in action without further delay”, the standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law and...

The process for finalising the parameters for the 2011 Census is on, and a key question is yet to be answered. In response to a question in Parliament, Union Minister of State for Home Ajay Maken said that the census exercise would be conducted between February 9 and 28, 2011. But there was no word on whether information on caste would be elicited. India’s decennial census is the largest data...

The distribution of iron fortified rice is part of the Government of India's push to combat anaemia and it will become a near mandatory programme for the poor, for whom this rice will be inescapable i.e., PDS, ICDS, school meals, etc.  The fact-finding visit was organised by Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA-Kisan Swaraj) and the Right To Food Campaign (RTFC) between June 13th to 15th 2022, and included a...

KEY TRENDS   • During 2014-15, while procurement of foodgrains (rice and wheat) increased from 56.9 million tonnes to 60.2 million tonnes, offtake of foodgrains (rice and wheat) from the PDS decreased from 59.8 million tonnes to 55.9 million tonnes. Despite increased availability in the PDS and prevalence of high inflation in foodgrains, dependence on the PDS is reducing, suggesting that there may be issues of availability, timely availability and quality of the PDS foodgrains...